Of course, primary goal for these guys (or these ladies – looks more like it) is to collect HR-database with contact of potential hires, as they always asking you to fill out your contact data in the end of survey. Yet the results of of the survey, which they promise to send everyone, who submit this survey can be very interesting for everyone in Dynamics AX community. I have filled out this questionnaire already, because I am interested in three things:

Quite naturally, I want to know which country has highest salary for a Dynamics AX specialist. 😉 Especially, after this salary is normalized by,say, Expatistan cost of living index

I want to figure out the proportion between cost of software (Dynamics AX in our case) and cost of implementation. Say, 11 years ago, when I started my career as an Axapta specialist, typical DAX project budget in Russia was around $100-120K for software and about $80-90K for for consulting. Now, after 10 years of high oil prices and consequential dollar wages increase, average salary in Dynamics AX market in Russia grew four-folds. Now, even with considerable increase in Dynamics AX price per user seat, cost of consulting typically is about 200% of software purchase costs. I am wondering, which country has highest, say, highest annual-wage to user-license-price ratio and which country – lowest. Actually, it looks a bit peculiar for me, that Microsoft use almost the same sales price for all countries regardless of their GDP per capita and average salary. I guess, if Microsoft pricing policy would be more flexible, they could greatly increase their user base in less-well-to-do countries. It might pay pretty well in future, but it requires more strategic kind of thinking then typical Microsoft executive have…

I am also want to compare an average Dynamics CRM salary year-over-year. I think, we are witnessing a kind of commoditization of Dynamics CRM market. In most cases, Dynamics CRM is used simply as development environment to make ANY kind of custom development. No significant knowledge in consulting in general and sales management principles in particular is required to enter this market. Most of Dynamics CRM specialists (at least, people I had chance to meet and work with) are techies, who studied Dynamics CRM in a row of other Microsoft technologies (somewhere after ASP.NET and MS SQL, but before Biztalk). So, I expect drop in average Dynamics CRM salaries in future. I recently red that Dynamics CRM revenue for Microsoft has increased by 30% in last quarter. It might be a good indication of forthcoming salary drop. Demand for CRM specialists will increase sharply and then drop sharply as well. Sooner or later, knowledge of Dynamics CRM can become kind of commodity knowledge, like knowledge of C# or MS SQL. It can still bring money, but this money won’t be as good as 2-3 years ago…

So, I hope that this survey will be representative enough to provide every participant with relevant data. That’s why it is so important for everyone to fill it out…